Crenshaw's Books & Decks

"Reading the Comments" is an exploration of online comments, of their nature, their authors, what is good, bad and funny about them. Reagle shows how comments inform (reviews), serve to improve your own works or projects (via feedback), can be manipulative and serve to alienate people (through abuse and hatred), and shape how we see the world and ourselves (via quantification and social comparison). Reagle uses a humongous amount of data, using the main platforms generating comments:Amazon, Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, fiction writers communities, and personal blogs.

The book poses and answers intriguing questions with a more or less degree of success:
> Why do people like disclosing info about themselves in their comments?
> Is society more narcissist today as a result of the Internet?
> Is anonymity the mother of all problems in abusive comments?
> Is fakery the exception or the norm in review?
> Who is writing false reviews and why? And what is being done to counteract it?
> Who are those creating sock-puppet accounts?
> Why do review sites benefit from your comments?
> How do Facebook and Google+ use your profile and contact list every time you rate a product?
> What is the difference between a comment and a review?
> What is the key to providing a good feedback that is useful to the author without hurting their feelings?
> Is a bullied person bullying a person as bully as the bully?
> Can good communities, in self-defence, morph into what they try to avoid?
> Do the gazillion comments processed during the day affect our ability to concentrate and our well-being?
> Is the pervasive rating and ranking of people and services dehumanising?

The book is divided in seven chapters:
1/ Comment, offers a contextualisation of comment, of what makes people comment, interact or to look for another place.
2/  Informed, is an introduction to reviews, ratings, unboxing videos and other informative commentary on the web.
3/Manipulation, is about the use of fake reviews and online fakery in general.These manipulators are fakers (those who deceptively praise their own works or pillory others), makers (those who do that for a fee), and the takers (those who avail themselves of such services).
4/ Improvement, deals with feedback: peer feedback, feedback in formal writing communities, and feedback in communities where the line between feedback and collaboration blurs.
5/ Alienated, describes online trolls and haters, bully battles and  misogyny, and tries to frame this "culture" with what we know about the effects of anonymity, deindividuation and depersonalization.
6/ Shaped, poses the question of how this infinite stream of information, status updates, and photos affects self-esteem and wellbeing and our view of ourselves.
7/ Bemused, focuses on the puzzling aspect of commenting as comments can be slapdash, confusing, amusing, revealing, and weird.

 I found this statement one of the most interesting in the book:

All forms of writing that have gone before are present on the Web— and at a very large scale. These types of comment existed before the twenty-first century, but never were they available in such great numbers or were they as easily accessible as they are today.

I love the historical contextualisation of commenting, and to learn that many attitudes we find online nowadays were very much alive in the past, and that well-known writers, philosophers and artists of the past were involved in actions or activities that are today found online. I found really good the section on feedback and the section on trolls very exhaustively informative. When you provide with historical antecedents for online behaviour that are rooted in morphed off-line behaviour, we can have a mini-epiphany because then, some behaviour and attitudes are not only contextualised but can be tackled in different ways. Reagle's analysis on quantification or rating, which are more relevant by the day in our times. was also really good.

I agree with Reagle about the search for intimate serendipity being one of the reasons why some people aren't in big social sites or social networks in general, they join when they are small and quit then when they become too big, too popular or the first scum appears, or they don't allow comments on their personal sites. That is my case, and that is great putting a name to what I do.

I really loved some of the comic strips from The Geek & Poke, a German nerdy comic-strip, reproduced in the book, which are really relevant for some of the matters discussed in it. I especially feel connected to the the one below, but this is precisely one of the comments I get most often from people I don´t know or have interaction with me, and the other one, that "the free gift" (above) use preached by corporations, major social networks and dot com start-up companies and geeks.

Reagle clearly mentions at the beginning that the book isn't about the future of online sites or of commenting online. This being the case, one of the most interesting and controversial aspects of commenting is hurdled over, which is very disappointing to me. In that regard, the book scratches the top layers of the subject, leaving many of the issues associated to commenting just described. Which is not bad if you want a comprehensive analysis of the subject without digging down.

Although I enjoyed the book, Reading the Comments is a bit a sum-up of things and research found in other works, and Reagle  does not always expresses his opinion on important matters; for example, how would he tackle some of the problems he describes? However, he does give his honest opinion other times, as when he says that he doesn't think anonymity is the problem for the state of the online world. In fact, some of the most abusive people I've come across online had their real photo and name displayed. I always appreciate solutions, or at least proposals on how to change things online, especially when an expert is writing. Reagle is, after all, an academic, an expert on communication and on the Internet so I expected more prognosis, diagnosis or  even personal involvement.

The book reads well as a course for students, where his students would learn about things and the teacher wouldn't always need to express his views upfront unless questioned. That is OK for a course, I expected more on bleeding matters: like sexist misogynist comments, the level of verbal aggression thriving online, why does trolling occur beyond those groups who made an entertaining of doing so? In that regard I found Sarah Jeon's book necessary to read after this, because she digs on the subject and provides readers with personal answers and solutions on how to turn things around. Both books complement each other quite well.

The book is wonderfully edited. I didn't notice any typo, the reference system and endnoting are flawless, something that, as a reader, I always appreciate.There is always a lot of work to get to that point, and you cannot take it for granted. I think the first chapter should be called Introduction, because that is what it is, and where the author mentions what he is going to do and describes the subjects discussed in each chapter.

The rendering for Kindle is excellent except for the index at the back, which isn't linked for Kindle, therefore, worthless. I always feel cheated when this happens.

IN SHORT

The book reads really well, is engaging, entertaining and digs on many aspects of the web that aren't well known to people who don't live on or research the Internet. Three and half stars rounding to 4. That is why the five-star-rating system sucks...

The Internet of Garbage is a personal reading for me because many of the issues discussed in the book have affected me personally, directly, in my online life, and too often to consider them isolated incidents. Herewith just three examples of a long list of personal examples of vilification due, mostly, to me being a woman.

***

Long ago I was in Flicker. My nick didn't show my gender. A contact used to praise my photos to the heavens. That was until he called me "man" and I told him that I was a woman. He started visiting my photo stream to abuse me, not my photos. From great photo to you are mentally disabled by making this photo, from a comment on my photo, you are an idiot. I ended blocking him because his vilification seemed to have no stop. In real life he seemed to be a normal guy, newly-married, happy, very social. That was his mask. With me he showed his real self. The abusive sexist prick he really is.

Long ago, I visited one of the Whirlpool forums to comment on an online company's misleading info about one of the products I had purchased from them. There was a representative of the company in the thread. He was the only person who treated me with respect and didn't bully me for just posting a post that wasn't offensive. I ignored the pricks. Yet, when I left, the bullying was in crescendo for no reason. My nick was female.

 ***

The Internet of Garbage is a short book, (or rather booklet) on different issues related to the garbage invading the Internet. The book is a very honest in-depth approach to the Internet on areas like gender harassment and vilification, doxing, SWATing, trolling, moderation, free speech and spam from a person who knows, inside out, how social networks and online platforms work and their legal and technical intricacies.

What is garbage? What does constitute spam? What does spam and harassment have in common? How does garbage present itself online? What we do with it? What should we do with it? Are the procedures to control online garbage working or not, and why? Moderation or blocking? Free speech or banning? Which groups are more likely to be harassed? Which groups are more likely to take the case to the Police and Court? Is harassment gendered or coloured? Why is online harassment so scary? Does harassment occur because the Internet is too big or too small? These are some of the questions that Jeong tackles and replies to in this book.

What I like the most about this book is not the focus on issues that are of great interest to me, or the knowledge on the area Jeong has, but the fact that she has a natural tendency to balance her own discourse, to see the pros and cons of anything she says, and to analyse any given aspect from different sides, never in a monolithic way. You have to praise that sort of old-school savoir fair because it is a rara avis nowadays.

Jeong offers a deep analysis that is missing from many books on the Internet, which can pinpoint and whine about the flaws of the system but aren't able to propose solutions to tackle situations for very difficult online issues. Some of the stuff Jeong discusses is very technical, with legal implications, but it is presented in an approachable language.

Jeong makes terrific points about how to deal with the crap on the Internet. She is convinced that the architecture of the Internet and the focus on behaviour (and not content) in my site's  conduct codes and policies are the key to curb down the volume and nastiness of online garbage. You cannot solve the problem of harassment, threats and abuse on the Internet by focusing just on the content posted, but by focusing on and addressing the behaviour that generates it. You can remove all the nasty comments manually but you aren't really creating a well-behaved online community that promotes healthy behaviour and excludes the usual mob of sociopathic misogynists and those who befriend them. She shows how functional platforms can be built and structured to promote a flow of  information, code of conduct and self-regulatory rules that promote healthy behaviour and naturally shred the garbage. Banning, blocking, filtering are just small tools that won't solve the problem, just give relief to the victims. Code is never neutral, the architecture of the Internet matters enormously.

 I find this very important, personally. I was recently insulted for a review that has 3.5 stars and the troll thought it was too low. He didn't uttered a swear word, but insulted me upfront, obvious to anybody who can read. I contacted the moderation team, as this troll is not a regular reviewer, and every time he comes to the site is to annoy me. The moderator told me that, unless the comment is explicitly racist or contains profanity (something very subjective as it varies from culture to culture, religion to religion), they cannot erase his comments. I deleted them myself. His activity in the the site is being tracked by the moderation team.  Even if he is eventually banned, he could reappear using another email address and nick and nothing would be solved. That is so because bad behaviour is not tackled by the moderation policies of the site. I  mentioned this book to the lovely guy who attended my complaint. Oh, Yes!

Although Jeong focus a good deal on well-known cases of female harassment (Caroline Criado Pérez, Anita Sarkeesian, Amanda Hess, Zoe Quinn, and Kathy Sierra), she calls the attention on the fact that not only women are targeted. independent male thinkers also are. And, of course, Afro-Americans, Latinos, gays, immigrants, and any 'minority' who are not in the media often because, at least in the States, they think it twice before going to the Police to complain about any issue, not just about online harassment.

I love Jeong's analysis on how online sites deal with spam detection, deletion and control, ad extracts positive conclusions that could be applied to the fight against online harassment. Also inspired is her discourse on the relation between discourses of free speech on the internet, banning and the USA's First Amendment to the Constitution. 

Jeong is also great at showing how the inadequacy and inefficiency of the system lead people who suffer from severe harassment, doxing, SWATing and physical attacks included, to retort to intricate legal  openings, like Copyright Laws, to find a way to deal with their issue (García v. Google).

Despite this being a great book, the language used is dry, clinical and a bit uninspired for the general public. It is jargon-free, that is great, but also a bit aseptic. I understand that, for a lawyer, the definition of what a word means is utterly important, that matters in Court, as much as the punctuation or tone of a given text. Yet, unless you are in Court or writing and targeting a specific group of readers, you don't need to define what spam is or what garbage is. My opinion.

A typo correction. Please, write Spanish surnames with their proper accent, Pérez and García are not accented throughout the book.

The title doesn't make any favour to the book as it is misleading. It seems to imply that all Internet is crap, while, in fact, the book focus on how much garbage the Internet has, and the need to clean it up and how to do this. One day Internet and garbage might be synonyms but, they are not so as yet.  

The Internet of Garbage is a great reading, a very thought-provoking book with a babble-free crappola-free discourse. This is also a great book to quote when we deal with moderation teams that adduce obsolete codes of conduct that focus on content not on behaviour to leave trolls and pathological misogynists camp at will in our space. 

This book fell in my hands because I have a natural predisposition towards slap-on-the-face books that deal with subjects and approaches that are not mainstream. They grease the wheels of my thinking like no others. I developed a liking for those when I was in my teens and they still are the sort of book that thrill me, no matter the flaws. That is so because having our brain enticed is the most wonderful feeling in the world, and something that we get rarely, rarer and rarer, nowadays.   
Equally thought-provoking and irritating, fascinating and annoying, "The Internet is not the Answer" is  a book about the hidden faces of the Internet and its impact in contemporary Economy and Society. We see the Internet not by entering through the main door where a nice bellboy kisses your feet and the hall looks like in a magazine cover, but by entering through the back door where all the sh+t is piled up, nobody is cleaning and the shift worker is going to spit on your face.We can enter that door because Keen is a Silicon Valley boy, even if not golden, and, therefore, an insider.  

Keen knows his trade and his field of expertise and that shows in a book that is well written and referenced and with no typo in sight. Keen channels, like a medium in trance, the voices of myriad critical Internet experts to create a patchwork of a discourse made by stitching together opinions that are not his but, actually,  are his. Keen does not hold his forked tongue a bit and speaks of people (names and all) and facts with irreverence and nausea, irritation and despair, but also with depth, insight and passion.  

Keen does a great job at summarising for us the History of the Internet from its gestation, birth, the arrival of the web 1.0 and the complete reinvention of Internet 2.0 with its different phases. The book explains in simple language the differences between the old and the contemporary Internet, how Internet went from a helpful tool, to an all-free paradise, and ended being a malignant narcissist pubescent monster. We go from the utopian libertarian and equality expectations and dreams of the web 1.0 to the dystopian reality in which everything is for sale, our soul included, and supranational corporations make money out of us but sell us fairy-flossed lies.

Keen highlights the hypocrisy of the Silicon Valley's elite and gurus who preach and sell a revolution, freedom, the power of the commons to create a different world, the value of failure to succeed, openness and transparency, and that they are the anti-establishment. However, de facto, they act as a mutant nastier version of the old rusty capitalists who made their fortunes after the first Industrial Revolution; they make the old capitalists look like the Sisters of Mercy; despite what the new gurus say, they have created opaque, non-egalitarian secretive organisations and groups of power and world domination that disregard governments, get your data without permission and sell it to the best bidder, do not pay or evade taxes, give a dam about work relations or exploitation, disregard the welfare of Society and of their workers, and act worse than the old establishment rich people did. These corporations are ran by white Western sexist males.

The example of what San Francisco has become since the Valley and the Bay were "Siliconed" it is exemplary enough: increased social differences, poorer work conditions and salaries, a ridiculously inflated house market, higher number of homeless people, and the big Internet companies creating a sort of segregated bubble that feeds on their own lies and purpose-created clichés and look at real people as if they did not get the world. What the contrary is true. 

The Internet companies are as hostile to trade unions, taxation and regulation as Rockefeller, Morgan or Carnegie, but these new titans employ less people. have higher margins and are less harassed by governments than their predecessors. 

Sometimes simple items of information work better than lengthy pages. Here some interesting ones:

> General Motors has a market cap of around 55 billion and employs 200.00+ people to manufacture cars in its factories. Google is seven times larger than GM but employs less than a quarter of the number of workers, is not creating many jobs and avoids paying taxes in some of the most developed countries in the world.
> Uber has received a quarter-billion dollar investment from Google Ventures.
>  Tumblr has 300 million users and just 178 employees and was sold for 1.1. billion bucks in 2013.
> WhatsApp employs 55 people and sells for 19 billion.
> Instagram has just 13 full-time employees while Kodak had 13 factories, 130 photo labs and about 47,000 workers. However, people in sharing sites like Instagram don't own their own photos and their Terms & Conditions allow Instagram a perpetual use of your photos and the right to license them to any third party without your permission or knowing.
>  The Internet has created a surreal economy in which we are not only the creator of the networked product, but also the product itself, therefore, the "free" stuff we get from these companies is not really free.

Keen explicitly says that he doesn't deny the value of the Internet or how our lives have changed and the benefits we get from it, (I mean, that would be stupid) but he focuses on the damage that the Economy of Internet Corporations is creating outside the web. 

Chapter 7 "Crystal Man" in perhaps my favourite chapter. Keen compares the ways in which the Eastern Germany's Stasi (the Secret Police and its mastermind Erich Mielk) organised the spying and profiling of the citizens of  the country with Google and Facebook, among others, which are doing the same but a global scale and with more precision. We are being profiled through our use of the Internet in ways that are terrifying, mostly because this is done without our consent and knowledge, or that of our governments at times, and we are being sold, literally, to whomever wants us. Internet Data Collection Companies (Indigogo, Kickstarted, Acxiom, and Palanquir among others) and their mere existence is just a bit scary if you are a normal citizen with no criminal mind and a normal average life and family, and that life is sold by somebody who is not you. 

I agree with Keen's observations and reflections on the narcissist culture that the Internet has exacerbated. Yes, narcissism is not new, but the worrying part is that it has become the new way of being, the new "normal". Like Keen, I hate the obsession with the selfie, the spread of crappola, the mob in social networks, the hyper-obsession with the me and the now, Zuckeberg's idiotic discourse and "necromantic" Facebook; the use of social media by sexist, racist, and terrorist people without that filth being pulped down by anybody; I dislike most social networks out there (I've used most of them and quit them in the blink of an eye). I'm personally worried about a society that is every day more "Googled" and the fact that I rely more than I would like on a Google calendar, a Google blog, a Google phone and a Google tablet. Yet, I love the web.

What Keen describes for us is upsetting and seems not to be heading anywhere good for us, the commoners, the data-producers, the pawns.

I was looking forward to the conclusion and Keen's answer to the gloomy panorama he presents us with. Keen supports the intervention and regulation by individual states and supranational institutions to put a limit to the Internet Masters and force them to pay taxes, to respect anti-trust policies, and not to profile citizens without the consent of their country of origin. I love the idea of a Magna Carta of the Web with Internet rights and duties that protects the web's neutrality against governments and Internet corporations. Yes, it would be great breaking down Google, Apple, Facebook and other big Internet companies by creating legislation against plutocrats. Keen is keen on the elimination of Piracy and Peer-to-Peer as well. I am not that optimistic, though, the corruption of politicians and the political system in most Western countries is nothing I rely on; many of our politicians are corrupt to the bone and love being part of the plutocracy and give a dam about us all.

Yet, what resonates the most with me is "take responsibility for your online actions" because it  is something that I believe in and practice. I deeply believe that we have the tools to change anything, and the tools are our own behaviour and actions. No magic formulas. Thus, is up to us to become a mob or not in the Internet, to allow ourselves to be seduced and abducted by the need to be cool and liked to feel better about ourselves. It is up to us to stop the big companies using our data by simply not being in sites like Facebook, Twitter, Tumbler, Yelp or any big corporation. And if we stay, we keep alert about manipulative actions of the site, and do our best to keep our privacy levels high. The way we use our credit card, the way we (don't) use our name not even in our email unpaid address, the browser and adds-on we choose, are little things we can do to hide a bit from Big Brother. There are gazillion things we can do with a click that cost nothing and offer relief and protection. Yet, the Internet has created a monster because the mob wants a monster they are happy to feed.

***

THE BUTS...
There are many things I don't agree with Keen, which justify the polarised reviews this book is getting. Beyond some dialectic strawmen he uses at times, I would like to comment on a few things.

The book reads quite often as an endless series of quotes by other people. Keen is a good writer, so it is difficult to understand why the need to quote ad nauseam. Why not saying what he thinks in his own words and quoting when it is necessary or the quote is really relevant? Aren't editors supposed to control this sort of thing?

Keen's narrative is like one of those mini-me on each shoulder, one is a devil the other an angel. However, the voice of the devil is louder in this book, even though Keen explicitly play devil's advocate with his own approach. Yet, this voice is not as strong. This produces an unbalanced discourse that it is easy to be attacked as biased.

I don't like the tone Keen uses at times when he speaks of some of the Silicon golden boys because it rests power to his discourse. I mean, they behave in disgusting ways, OK, I get it, but I suppose that Keen is not the only Silicon boy with a bit of decency, right? And truly, if he despises these people so much, why does he hang out with them? Talk to them? Go to conventions in which he does not belong and he abhor? Why does he slash Amazon and Jeff Bezos and then go and sells his book in Amazon? 

Many of the things Keen complains about the Economy of the Internet are actually pre-Internet and, even today, year 2015, not linked to the Economy of Internet at all. It is called savage capitalism and unfair competition and monopoly practices. To this very day big supermarket chains are pushing small supermarkets out of business with dirty tactics that have nothing to do with the Internet. Huge book stores forced decades ago the closing down of hundreds of small book stores even before the web 2.0 was invented. 

Yes, the Silicon boys are despicable, they preach one thing and they have super mansions with private beaches closed to the public. Well, you have celebrities and movie stars, whose contribution to Society has been zero, doing the same, or buying whole islands and nobody is complaining.

Yes, it is true that the current web system does not spread good information or good news and is actually misinforming. Yet, before the arrival of the Internet 2.0 TV stations like CNN (where Keen is a contributor) have been unashamedly manipulating international news for the mobs for years. British and Australian newspapers managed and operated by off-line professional journalists regularly spread racist and culturally imperialistic views of the world with a constant vilification of the Mediterranean and its people as a whole selling patent lies to any people who knows some of those countries. And no, I am not talking about Greece.

Keen's view and use of creative disruption is infused in negativity most of the time. The French Revolution was disrupting and bloody and still changed History for good. The invention of the steam machine and the Industrial Revolution created similar gloomy forecasts about humanity, the environment, mechanisation, the destruction of traditional jobs and other issues. Sometimes disruption is needed to get to better places in life, and is not done the rosey way. Other ways disruption is just destruction. Keen's discourse is unbalanced because he does push the negative button too often. Perhaps a simply rephrasing of many of the things he says would have conveyed his message better and more fairly.  

Keen has a sort of romantic vision of what the middle classes and society were in the 50s and 60s. It might be so in the UK and the US. My parents lived the 50s surrounded by misery, hard working conditions, poor salaries and a very hard life.

Regarding the kingdom of the amateur is nothing new, just a exacerbation of things. Why is this kingdom spreading so easily? My answer is because people want to be cool, want to get fame, want to get money with the least possible effort and personal investment. People don't want to be the best in their job, they want to be the best paid, the most popular, the most liked, the most featured, the one in power. People aren't happy being themselves, they want to be more than they are, and they create a life full of lies to fool themselves; not only that, they will do anything and everything to obscure and destroy those who shine without the need of a flash. Have you even met a moron or an ignoramus giving lessons? There you have the new model. That was not born with the Internet. Yet, to balance my own discourse, I have seen amateur artistic photographers and artists on Flickr who were better than many professionals. Some people selling on Etsy sell handmade wonderful stuff at a fraction of the price even some of them are not professionals. Not everything is monochrome.

I don't agree with Keen on Piracy and Peer-to-Peer being the same, Pirate Bay is one thing, sharing music or movies with my best pal for free another thing. Also, Keen does not scratches the surface on the main question. Why  do people download pirated material? Keen replies to it easily, because piracy material is easy to find and not enough is being done to avoid this. Yet, is that the only reason? Are all people downloading for the same reasons? I wonder how people without a job, people who have difficulties making ends meet, or students living on the verge of poverty do to go to the cinema (or pay a paid TV channel) and buy hard copy music regularly. Libraries allow customers who pay nothing to get books, CDS and DVS, and that is legal. People love going to the cinema, I don't know anybody who does not, why don't they go more often? Are the prices demanded by multinational record companies really fair and benefit the artists as much as they deserve? How much is too much for a CD or DVD and why?  There is lots to scratch here before getting my itch comforted.   

***

A NOTE ON THE BOOK COVER
Is there any need to have a dreadful cover for both hard-copy and Kindle? Is plain ugly the new creative? 

Update
The cover of the Kindle Edition has been changed since I wrote this review in Amazon to something decent, but not great yet  =) 

IN SHORT
A great book to munch on, with a bit of crappolina. Read it with care, though.

Update2
I got this video in my Mozilla's front page Funny. It summarises well many of the issues discussed in this book
We are all for sale